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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Here is the part of the latest Guardian Snowden release that made my hair stand on end:

To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for “human intelligence” refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents.

This GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, “responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry.”

If you’re sitting in a cubicle somewhere in Silicon Valley, Reston, Bethesda, Cambridge, you need to be asking yourself, “is this my neighbour? …is it me?!” Are company officers now wondering if they have to defend against internally created vulnerabilities? Are they liable? If you’re running an online banking system, for example, you should be nervous. Really nervous.

It’d be really nice to see some of these weasels outed, or coming forward burned by their conscience… not holding my breath.

The rest of the leak is incredibly shocking (if not particularly well reported) but it’s now hard to be surprised. Conversations i’ve had over the last few months have pretty much assumed that everything released today is happening. When it comes down to compromising the core infrastructure of the internet in the hunt for the boogeymen (you’re more likely to be killed by your furniture than by terrorism, etc) the security services are taking massive risks. That they think that they can get away with is either extremely arrogant, or naive.

As Bruce Schneier remarked elsewhere, at this point we’re pretty much playing the odds.

In order to fulfill a request for a high quality scan (more ragged trousered philanthropy on my part…) i’ve been looking at an old (01.09) of negatives and wondering how to do a better job of scanning them.

They are obviously over exposed, and have always scanned with a huge amount of grain. It has always seemed to be that it’s easier to rescue underexposed negatives when scanning, the opposite when printing. With some experimentation i’ve managed to badger Silverfast into giving me what, to me at least, is an interesting result.

Really like the feel of them now. An uneasy nostalgia.

Another situation where i fought with myself over whether or not to crop. There is nothing (?!) that annoys me more than un-intentionally off horizons, and yet i can’t bring myself to make the cuts!